Swallowed up

Eventually...

...life will break you.

If you are forty-something and you haven't been touched by divorce, death, financial catastrophe or serious illness, then count yourself very fortunate...and prepare.

Solitude is the best preparation. You can lessen your odds that you'll feel pain by avoiding relationships. You can keep tragedy to a taste instead of a meal.

I do like people...really I do. But maybe it's just the abstract concept of people. I like books and movies and songs about love, pain, hope, heartache, and triumph. But in reality those things are messy. And some of them hurt. A lot. So, if you never marry, you'll never divorce. If you never have children, then you'll never suffer through their pain and won't have to realize how truly vulnerable we all are. If you keep your friends at arms length, you can still sympathize but won't have to suffer through their cancer. It's an easier way to live. But eventually...

...solitude will break you.

It will break you with it's yearning. You can strive to protect yourself from life and you may mostly succeed. But that is not the reason you are here. You have to feel. You have to love. You...we...are here to risk our heart. We are here to experience, to taste life and be swallowed up by it.

And when it happens that we fail - when we grieve for a child - when we are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, we will remind ourselves that we are human and this is part of the human experience. At the end, we should know that we tasted as much as we could.